Justin Delacour writes an engaging media blog, Latin American News Review, in which he comments on news of Latin America and links to articles and essays that are written from perspectives not often found in large corporate media coverage of the region.
In a recent post, “Freedom from One-Sided Expression,” Delacour links to a series of articles and essays commenting on mainstream media coverage of the controversy surrounding Hugo Chavez and the non-renewal of a license for broadcasting for television station RCTV, a station associated with political opposition to Chavez’s government. One of the articles Delacour links to is “Why Can’t Foreign Lefties Learn to Be Objective Like Us?” by Christian Christensen.
The arguments of Christensen’s interesting essay can be summed up as follows I think. (Some of this is clear and explicit in the essay, and some is my interpretation of unstated premises beneath Christensen’s explicit statements – so please take a look at Christensen’s essay itself.)
1. There is a bias against “leftism” on the part of major corporate North American media outlets, whether concerning “leftist” governments or the possibility of “objectivity” on the part of “leftist” media. (Something not discussed so much by Christensen, but something I have encountered in some media coverage of the controversy is a converse assumption of objectivity on the part of media in opposition to “leftists.”)
2. Chavez is the leftist bogeyman de jour, and mainstream corporate news coverage presents a consistent bias against him and his government.
3. Mainstream North American media coverage is not as objective as it claims, but reflects the interests of the corporate conglomerates of which media outlets are a part, in the process practicing a form of self-censorship.
4. It is hypocritical for mainstream media commentators to decry things like state censorship of opposition-associated stations in places like Venezuela while engaging in a form of news censorship themselves.
I don’t so much find major grounds to disagree with what Christensen has said or implied as I do have a couple reactions. First, while I agree that corporate media self-censorship is a major concern (it makes it difficult to have an enlightened public engaged in civil society), and that the emphasis on Chavez’s state censorship is even hypocritical, the hypocritical nature of much North American coverage of Venezuela is no reason to not be concerned about Chavez and his government’s actions in some instances. (I want to be careful to say that Christensen doesn’t say that there’s no reason to be concerned about Chavez – it’s just not really a topic he addresses. The matter of Chavez and the non-renewal of RCTV’s license for public broadcasting is also complicated. Is it an instance of state censorship? In one sense, a license was simply not renewed, and the channel has apparently returned, though as a cable channel, which in Venezuela has reduced its potential audience. At the same time, the non-renewal of the license was clearly politically motivated.)
Finally, I think that both state censorship and corporate media self-censorship are causes for concern. Christensen doesn’t actively conflate the two, though I find it worthwhile to draw a larger distinction between the two practices. Not only are the actors different – states and corporations, but more importantly, these are different modes of channeling public discourse. When a state, any state, acts to shut down a media outlet or to proscriptively influence what can be said, this is a repressive act. Some of what could be said has been disallowed, and even if only one station or newspaper is actively targeted, there is a broader chilling effect on public discourse. The effects of corporate self-censorship might be just as or even more pervasive in some instances but works in a different way, through the production of a particular discourse. The effects on what someone without the time, inclination, or ability to seek out alternative perspectives is likely to hear and read are severe, but there’s no real repression in this instance. There’s no repression of blogs like Delacour’s or essays like Christensen's or even national news weeklies like The Nation which regularly present alternative perspectives (and which are readily available to anyone looking for them).
Showing posts with label mass media. Show all posts
Showing posts with label mass media. Show all posts
Thursday, August 30, 2007
Tuesday, March 20, 2007
How Unique or Radically New is Our Situation Today?
Thomas Friedman’s book The World is Flat has been widely reviewed, read, and discussed. The book provides an engaging perspective on the current situation of globalization, even if the metaphor of the world being flattened becomes tiresome after about the twentieth or thirtieth repetition. There is one element of the book that I wish to disagree with here. This is the sense (not original to Friedman but very much present in the book) that most of us have much of the time that we live in a unique moment in history (though who hasn’t), with much that is radically new transforming how human life and culture work.
There is much that is new about our current situation, with much of it discussed intelligently by Friedman, including the importance of the internet and world wide web, personal digital technologies, shipping containers and mega-ships, just in time production, outsourcing of jobs – at first mainly manufacturing jobs but increasingly digitally based “information” jobs as well, 24 hour cable news, etc. All these and more do have immense impact on all of our lives, and this gives us the sense that we live in a unique moment of radical transformation. It’s more that we live within a world that is being continually socially transformed, but this has been happening continuously for a good century and a half, with the sense of living in a uniquely transformative moment occurring to people throughout this same period of time.
Modern life is characterized by a number of things that make it different from other ways of living. Some of the most important features of modern life are fast (and global) communication, fast transportation, mass media, and the dominance of a capitalist mode of economic production. Each of these was taking shape between the mid-eighteenth and mid-nineteenth century. Today we are surrounded by phenomena that represent important quantitative developments of each of these themes, and developed to the point that it makes a qualitative difference – life today is different than in 1950, or 1900, but the most radical historical distinction, practically a rupture with the past, occurred for a generation in the mid to late 19th century when the beginnings of modern communication and transportation, large scale mass media in the form of what Benedict Anderson has called “print capitalism,” and the fully developed industrial revolution all came together.
Fast Communication
In Simon Winchester’s book Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded, August 27, 1883, one of the most interesting facts discussed is that the eruption and devastation of Krakatoa was one of the first, if not the first, events which people all around the world knew about within a couple days, thanks to a global telegraphy network by then in place.
Today, we take for granted near-instantaneous global communication, with nearly up to the minute news from around the world readily available. While this, made possible via all the communications technologies developed since the telegraph, is an important improvement over the flow of information around the world in a few days, the development and implementation of a world wide telegraph system was a far more radical transformation of communication. That is, the spread of information around the planet within a few days is quite rapid and even near-instantaneous, compared to the months it had previously taken for such global communication.
Fast Transportation
The most important recent innovations in modern transportation, as discussed by Friedman, are probably the standardized shipping container and mega-ships to carry them around the world, with these helping to facilitate just in time production, the outsourcing of manufacturing jobs, and the low prices at Walmart. Still, while many around the world still can’t take for granted the use of fast personal transportation or jetliners, and while these are just becoming readily available to the masses in places like India or China, these have been largely taken for granted by many in more economically developed parts of the world for decades.
Further, the truly radical and new invention was not of the airplane or automobile, nor the shipping container and mega-ship, but the harnessing of effective steam engines for transportation, whether in the form of ocean-going steam ships, river boats, or railroads. Not to diminish the significance of planes or cars, but the steam engine was the first modern transportation technology and made the world “small” to a greater degree, cutting transportation times for people or goods from months or years to days or weeks.
Mass Media
CNN, the world wide web, email, online news, and the blogosphere are important and make our lives today different than that of a generation ago. Again, though, the absolute new-ness of such technologies and media pales in comparison to the first mass media.
In Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson talks about the significance of early mass media in the form of “print capitalism,” i.e. newspapers which had increasing prominence from the mid-18th through the mid-19th century. As Anderson argues, such early mass media had an important role to play in shaping how people saw the world and their place in it, and in the process helped to facilitate the development of national consciousness and the modern nation-state. For the very first time, large numbers of people within a particular national context were exposed to the same news in the same form at roughly the same time, facilitating a sort of national “dialogue” and the “imagined community” of the nation.
Capitalism
Capitalism has roots that stretch back before the mid-19th century, but it is during that period that capitalist production became dominant alongside a matured industrial revolution in an increasingly global economy. It was also in this period that quite large numbers of people in northeastern North America and western Europe were being “proletarianized” for the first time.
Most today take free wage labor for granted. Workers might fear the loss of their jobs or desire a larger slice of the capitalist pie in the form of higher wages or better benefits, but most workers, at least in places that have been thoroughly capitalist in production for several generations (Michael Taussig’s book The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America presents the very different perspectives of workers just being proletarianized in Colombia and Bolivia), don’t experience wage labor as unnatural or alienating (enervating, perhaps, but not unnatural or alienating – where instead pulling one’s weight or doing an honest day’s work can be a source of great pride). The process of becoming proletarian, of going from being a largely self-subsistent farmer or someone who sold the products of their labor to someone who sold their labor, a bodily process, without any ownership or stake in the products of their labor, was experienced quite differently. Today, and for a century or so in the earliest thoroughly capitalist parts of the world, labor unions typically fight for a better stake within capitalist production for labor, where early proletarians saw their new position as a radical and alienating experience, often resisting not only their low place within the system, but the system altogether.
There is much that is new about our current situation, with much of it discussed intelligently by Friedman, including the importance of the internet and world wide web, personal digital technologies, shipping containers and mega-ships, just in time production, outsourcing of jobs – at first mainly manufacturing jobs but increasingly digitally based “information” jobs as well, 24 hour cable news, etc. All these and more do have immense impact on all of our lives, and this gives us the sense that we live in a unique moment of radical transformation. It’s more that we live within a world that is being continually socially transformed, but this has been happening continuously for a good century and a half, with the sense of living in a uniquely transformative moment occurring to people throughout this same period of time.
Modern life is characterized by a number of things that make it different from other ways of living. Some of the most important features of modern life are fast (and global) communication, fast transportation, mass media, and the dominance of a capitalist mode of economic production. Each of these was taking shape between the mid-eighteenth and mid-nineteenth century. Today we are surrounded by phenomena that represent important quantitative developments of each of these themes, and developed to the point that it makes a qualitative difference – life today is different than in 1950, or 1900, but the most radical historical distinction, practically a rupture with the past, occurred for a generation in the mid to late 19th century when the beginnings of modern communication and transportation, large scale mass media in the form of what Benedict Anderson has called “print capitalism,” and the fully developed industrial revolution all came together.
Fast Communication
In Simon Winchester’s book Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded, August 27, 1883, one of the most interesting facts discussed is that the eruption and devastation of Krakatoa was one of the first, if not the first, events which people all around the world knew about within a couple days, thanks to a global telegraphy network by then in place.
Today, we take for granted near-instantaneous global communication, with nearly up to the minute news from around the world readily available. While this, made possible via all the communications technologies developed since the telegraph, is an important improvement over the flow of information around the world in a few days, the development and implementation of a world wide telegraph system was a far more radical transformation of communication. That is, the spread of information around the planet within a few days is quite rapid and even near-instantaneous, compared to the months it had previously taken for such global communication.
Fast Transportation
The most important recent innovations in modern transportation, as discussed by Friedman, are probably the standardized shipping container and mega-ships to carry them around the world, with these helping to facilitate just in time production, the outsourcing of manufacturing jobs, and the low prices at Walmart. Still, while many around the world still can’t take for granted the use of fast personal transportation or jetliners, and while these are just becoming readily available to the masses in places like India or China, these have been largely taken for granted by many in more economically developed parts of the world for decades.
Further, the truly radical and new invention was not of the airplane or automobile, nor the shipping container and mega-ship, but the harnessing of effective steam engines for transportation, whether in the form of ocean-going steam ships, river boats, or railroads. Not to diminish the significance of planes or cars, but the steam engine was the first modern transportation technology and made the world “small” to a greater degree, cutting transportation times for people or goods from months or years to days or weeks.
Mass Media
CNN, the world wide web, email, online news, and the blogosphere are important and make our lives today different than that of a generation ago. Again, though, the absolute new-ness of such technologies and media pales in comparison to the first mass media.
In Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson talks about the significance of early mass media in the form of “print capitalism,” i.e. newspapers which had increasing prominence from the mid-18th through the mid-19th century. As Anderson argues, such early mass media had an important role to play in shaping how people saw the world and their place in it, and in the process helped to facilitate the development of national consciousness and the modern nation-state. For the very first time, large numbers of people within a particular national context were exposed to the same news in the same form at roughly the same time, facilitating a sort of national “dialogue” and the “imagined community” of the nation.
Capitalism
Capitalism has roots that stretch back before the mid-19th century, but it is during that period that capitalist production became dominant alongside a matured industrial revolution in an increasingly global economy. It was also in this period that quite large numbers of people in northeastern North America and western Europe were being “proletarianized” for the first time.
Most today take free wage labor for granted. Workers might fear the loss of their jobs or desire a larger slice of the capitalist pie in the form of higher wages or better benefits, but most workers, at least in places that have been thoroughly capitalist in production for several generations (Michael Taussig’s book The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America presents the very different perspectives of workers just being proletarianized in Colombia and Bolivia), don’t experience wage labor as unnatural or alienating (enervating, perhaps, but not unnatural or alienating – where instead pulling one’s weight or doing an honest day’s work can be a source of great pride). The process of becoming proletarian, of going from being a largely self-subsistent farmer or someone who sold the products of their labor to someone who sold their labor, a bodily process, without any ownership or stake in the products of their labor, was experienced quite differently. Today, and for a century or so in the earliest thoroughly capitalist parts of the world, labor unions typically fight for a better stake within capitalist production for labor, where early proletarians saw their new position as a radical and alienating experience, often resisting not only their low place within the system, but the system altogether.
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